The all-soy tempeh turned out great, but not so much the peanut mix. I must have over-roasted the peanuts when I was drying them out to get the skins off. The mold grew just fine over the soybeans, but it completely ignored the firm, nearly crunchy peanuts, so that it didn't bind together; it's like nuggets of tempeh with peanut halves loosely bagged in with it. It made for a decent hash sort of thing.

I made a major breakthrough in de-hulling (or should it be just 'hulling' in the sense that when you remove peas from their pod or nuts from their shells, you're 'shelling'?). It hit me while I was bringing a pot of dry soybeans to a boil (in a boil-then-soak soaking), when the hulls of the beans, which, when dry, are white and brittle, soaked up the water immediately and pulled away from the still-dry beans. Now, I had read of tempeh producers using a wet-roller method to de-hull, so I grabbed a rolling pin and used it with some other ad hoc spacing implements to half-squish the beans as I rolled them, de-hulling them in the process.

The Thanksgiving tempeh prep did not go as planned. The soybeans weren't quite as soft as I'd like them to be when I had finished cooking them before inoculation (over the weekend before T-day). Come to think of it I cold soaked them instead of a boil-and-soak like I usually do, and had trouble getting them de-hulled. I didn't think too much of it, but the straight-soy tempeh turned out a little wet, a little too much stinking of ammonia. Oddly enough, the mostly-peanut tempeh, which was about 1/3 the same soybeans, turned out divine.

I decided to do one more quick, all-soy batch. I did EVERYTHING right this time. I did a boil-and-soak, the hulls came off easily, and I only inoculated the beans when they were good and cooked. The tempeh turned out perfect, and Tim reports that it went over very well at the Rudin/Rennick T-day feast.

I got my eagerly awaited package from GEM a few days ago. Now I've got the tempeh I need to make the batch for Tim's Thanksgiving.


This is what the starter looks like:


It's a course mix of rice flour and the itty bitty black specks of spores that will reawaken into the white, fluffy fungus that does all the work.

I also ordered some calcium sulfate.

Doesn't that sound chemical? I suppose it it, but it's a naturally occurring mineral a.k.a. gypsum, and it works great for coagulating tofu. Tofu is much, much harder to make than tempeh, though that might be because I have a lot less experience with it. Tofu making also has a colder feel to it. Tempeh is kind of like a biology experiment, preparing the medium for life to flourish. Tofu is a chemistry experiment: grinding, boiling, and finally adding one last ingredient for those proteins to denature and clump together as tofu.

At dinner recently some friends complimented the tempeh I had given them. One was a dedicated carnivore, so that wasn't just the vegetarian solidarity talking. I promised them some more, this time a half peanut batch... as soon as the culture gets here.

I am waiting for a new batch of culture from GEM. My cousin asked me for a large batch of tempeh for Thanksgiving, and I'm just the slightest bit nervous that the culture won't arrive in time. GEM's is, so far, the best I've tried. Even at about six months sitting in my fridge, it produced beautiful, fluffy, clean tempeh at a smidgeon less than the recommended amount (I was running out). They offer no online ordering, though. You have to print out the form and mail it in with a check (which required me to figure out where my checkbook was - how long has it been since I've paid for something with other than Paypal, online bill paying, or a credit card?), which advances by snail mail from Philadelphia to the other side of the country (Washington state) and then the culture has to repeat the journey back to the East Coast.